Thoughts on progression and balance aspects after my first 130 hours of full pY

[jigsaw3xD]

Thoughts on progression and balance aspects after my first 130 hours of pY (automated logi but didn't research anything from it yet). No balance-altering mods, only QoL stuff. Started on a 2.0 version of the game without SA's features like belt stacking and spoilage (but with elevated rails). Full pY recommended map gen settings (tho since there was no enemies to stop me I went to 200M patches of ores from the very start of the game).

I liked that automation pack requires wood that has a very long processing chain yet it could be gathered by hand. I don't think in any overhauls I was ever building a processing chain while the science pack that uses its end product was already comfortably researching.

I liked that everything is being produced/consumed at such slow rates so when you add more production buildings you can rely even on one side of the belt to carry your bus to logi. I was kinda dreading red belts being so far away in the tech tree but now I see that they weren't needed once. Some people on discord said pY tries its best to discourage you from using the bus (which got 125 tiles wide at the end) but it really doesn't and if the intent is there this is not how you'd discourage that. With that said tho, I think moss and log productions are way too slow and were probably the grindiest parts of my run, especially with how early they come into play.

The most underwhelming part of the run so far was power generation. For some reason a player is allowed to easily spam boiler-steam engine stacks and have zero power problems (and after those 50h the next 50 you spam cheap geothermal even more effortlessly). What's even more strange to me is that pY seems to have lots of unique and very interesting ways of power gen (aerostats, tidal power, several types of wind turbines) but it doesn't incorporate them into the (early) game in any way, they are way too expensive and inferior to geothermal/salt at the point of their unlock. One of the things that made Nullius' early game stand out is that it didn't have generic steam engines and you had to learn and get by by it's own power sources. Personally I think pY's early game deserves a complete power rebalance bringing unique power gen ways much earlier and making them more favorable while nerfing the aforementioned OP ways to the ground.

With that said tho I liked the salt power. Unlike geothermal its infrastructure is pretty expensive, has a production loop you gotta figure out and its loopable resource is pretty slow to gather (i wish it'd been even slower to make it more satisfying to use in an end-setup).

I liked the raw coal -> tar production chain and subsequently tar -> aromatics. I like how much outputs you need to balance there, how you need to find a way to void coal for more tar, how kerogen -> shale -> light oil provide a viable alternative if you decide to really dig into the recipe book. With that said tho this (and a couple of other recipe chains) was pretty much the outlier/highlight in terms of interesting and complex production chains. Most of the productions are just yet another nameless intermediate with a non-complex recipe and one producing building which is more than enough to make you four times more than you currently need. Don't get me wrong, I like how big my base looks but there's no denying that at the very least 1/3 of it is just filler with nothing interesting or complex to the recipe chain, production building or any other gameplay aspect. And when you pair that with an easy power generation you arrive at a pretty surprising conclusion that Nullius' early game (with its complex and expensive power gen mechanics and long voiding chains which pY lacks entirely) was actually more harder and complex than pY's.

I liked the alien creatures (vrauks, auogs, cottonguts) and how they're handled in the progression. Unlike pretty much everything else they're always a big deal you have to dedicate your full attention to in your progression and spend time to figure out exactly how the processing chain works and bootstrap the first specimens. I liked that while they are all based on a looping recipe of sorts each production has a unique quirk to it and is different from the previous one (sometimes easier but different). The alien parts byproduct that comes into play later is even more satisfying to balance out and incorporate into the animal sample production. At times bootstrapping recipes felt a bit way too expensive tho (auogs) even when partially automated.

I very much liked the visual side of the mod and the amount of effort that went into its many sprites. Even tho some of them look placeholder-y most pack an insane amount of detail and thought that was put into them (as to how the machine functions). The alt-mode everyone plays with does mod's visuals a giant disservice by obscuring a lot of the aesthetical aspects. Sometimes when I just wanna chill I turn it off and just run around looking at the machinery or just watch menu simulations. One of the reasons i didn't mind the excess of intermediate materials as much is cos most of them were done in a new building you get to see working for the first time. The gigantic size plays a role too, my favorite buildings so far were probably the Reformer and Antimony Drill just for their sheer size. Seeing a new AL factory is always a treat as well.

While I didn't even notice the absence of splitters (good gimmick to filter out casuals tho) I liked the absence of decider combinators. The need to emulate their "and"/"or" functionality with pumps and even inserters made a generic approach to balancing outputs a bit different. With that said tho, the absence of speakers felt pointless and only added more frustration as without them you needed to waste a lot of time rechecking on things working properly and then waiting for the materials to slowly fill an empty belt again if those had failed (just to be clear, im talking mostly about drills running out of resources, not me having a skill issue of building unfunctional production lines). Not sure if ash management was intended to be an actual thing you're suppose to engage with or (like splitters) something to scare players off cos I ended up spamming a stack of 20 chests (which I gradually upgraded to steel ones) at the end of basically every production chain that makes ash and they never overfilled. The stack value of 1k is very generous and if a player isn't suppose to just shove ash into a chest with no consequences then it needs to be nerfed by at least two or something.

I liked the abundance of different liquid fuels, LF as an ingredient a lot of buildings additionally take and LF puzzle, the necessity to have a functioning liquid fuel factory (of your choice) but consume excess from other production lines with priority in a sushi-pipe of sorts.

I liked the TURD system and how pricy it is to research but didn't like the fact that some of them offer a choice with the ingredients you don't know anything about yet (and won't for quite some time). Not knowing if an option with an unknown ingredient will be good or not just makes you not choose it at all and feel like you've just wasted 2k of very expensive packs on nothing. I think TURDs should provide you with a choice you can confidently make at the time of research, not hundreds of hours later (especially since apparently you can revert the changes with a midgame tech or something). Understanding all the choices and choosing one was always satisfying while realizing you can't make an educated choice for now was very much not.

I didn't like the fact that elevated rails are locked behind the logi while rails are behind py1 (just like it didn't make sense in SA it doesn't here, they should be unlocked at the same science pack). I didn't like that while pumps are buffed to the old 12k/s (which is good) pipeline extents remain enabled, imo they do not fit pY-scaled bases and only serve as an annoyance, also limiting you in ways of balancing several liquids between productions (hell, even the wube's liquids guy doesn't like them). Didn't like that despite water being free everything needs it in such little quantities, would've been more fitting to have water-hungry productions and needing to add an offshore pump to the water pipe every once in a while since water is free and basically teleports to all the pipe segments in 2.0.

I very much liked tailings ponds but think they should be locked at least behind py1 and cost way more to craft (like at least 10 times more). Didn't understand why they don't store gasses and even vent them and why there's no a tailings ponds' alternative for them. Tanks are a complete mess in terms of their cost (relative to what material they're locked behind; there's a bunch of inferior tanks that are locked behind a much more expensive later material) and volume relative to their. The "tank rebalance" option (that feels like a scrappy band-aid way to tackle the issue in question) does fix their size but not the cost and also tanks' sprites retain their og size numbers which is probably gonna end up being so distracting and confusing I'll have to make myself a mod with those numbers photoshopped out.

Speaking of things that were so unnecessary annoying that they forced a played to learn factorio modding - the different icons for animal parts on the belt. Guts, brains and meat (and something else i think) are very hard to tell apart on the belt so I had to limit their belt visualization to only one sprite per item. In 99% of cases I actually liked when an item had different belt sprites but not alien parts, that's where the function starts to drag behind a style so to say. I also disliked the fact that reproductive centers play jazz lol. It's a fun gag but I assume a lot of people (including me) will be playing the game with their own background music and so every time you park near RCs you get this out of tune cacophony (I had to swap RC's working sounds with another machine and I think the jazz sample should be an option you can turn off in settings). Since we're on the topic of SFX, the sound of Moondrop Greenhouses is so unnecessarily bass-boosted that my whole desk starts to rumble whenever I'm around them lol, low freqs are way overblown compared to any other factory in the game.

[BeaulieuT]

Just popping in to give a shout-out to hard mode, I think it fixes a lot of your grievances with py. I know restarting a run would be kinda painful, so this is not to convince you to play it or anything, just here for reference.

Hard mode adds smaller chest sizes, so it's MUCH harder to get away with spamming chests to ignore ash in the early game. This also means that spamming boilers for steam power is not an easy solve, because you have to deal with all the ash that it generates. Using ash separation to deal with the ash has a really high power coat, so it makes the early game power balance much more interesting and adds a lot of considerations.

Power should continue to get more interesting in your current run though, from here on out it's more molten salt power in different implementations and it's pretty fun.

Anyways, thanks for sharing your thoughts!

[jigsaw3xD]

Hard mode

I am aware of its existence but I don't think it should excuse the fact that a part of vanilla progression is missing in one way or another. Power gen and ash management aren't not hard enough, they're not hard at all and so imo a balance between nothing and HM's approach could be found for optimal experience.

[protocol-1903]

A few notes of my own:

The release of PySEx will overhaul/replace most systems within their respective mods if not overhauling them in PySEx. I know for a fact that power generation is getting redone. I'm pretty sure the tanks are getting overhauled. I also expect other systems to get tweaks, especially when playing with PySEx.

Tailings ponds are open-faced holes in the ground where you dump fluids. Gasses, when dumped, escape into the atmosphere. It says so in the description. They're not meant to be efficient, they just exist.

Your complaints about elevated rails and other, isolated issues may be valid. Create an issue for the ones you think should be changed and the dev team can look into solutions.

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[protocol-1903]

Apologies, my girlfriend got ahold of my keyboard and decided i needed to spruce up my message.

As I was trying to say, water used to be pretty well balanced in 1.1. Due to fluid flow rates, everything used water at a pretty good level so that bigger builds needed a lot more (enough so that my large science multiplier base needed Fluid Must Flow ducts just to run normally at py1). But since flow limits have been effectively removed in 2.0, they have not been as much of a consideration. I think this topic should be revisited, make it into a new discussion and we can talk about rebalancing water.

Some of the building SFX is screwed up, there's an issue on here for that topic. Post any complaints or requests there.

Ash management is not meant to be a major part of pY. Earlygame you have too much of it, and somewhere in the middle of the game you swap from having too much to having too little. It's not meant to be hard, just another challenge alongside everything else. PyHardMode is where the "hard" modifications are. Ash management is indeed an intended mechanic to be engaged with, but there are enough solutions that trying to force the player to have fewer options would make the game too difficult for the average player. Hence, PyHardMode.

Py early game is intentionally simple. It's meant to ease players into Py, not throw them in the deep end. Again, that's what HardMode and PyBlock are for. It gets more complex later on simply because that's the intended progression.

[BeaulieuT]

I just have to chime in to say that the phrase "py early game is intentionally simple" is hilarious. I agree, I think you guys did a great job with it, but it's just funny because I can imagine many factorio players would disagree with that statement lol.

But really, I think py has a fantastic progression and eases players into the complexity as much as it possibly can. I absolutely love the way ash and other things like coke go from abundant to scarce and back and forth throughout the game, keeps things interesting.

[jigsaw3xD]

py early game is not simple the way vanilla factorio is simple but it is not the hardest out there. in my experience seablock' early game is much slower and nullius' is more complex.

[jigsaw3xD]

The release of PySEx will overhaul/replace most systems within their respective mods if not overhauling them in PySEx. I know for a fact that power generation is getting redone. I'm pretty sure the tanks are getting overhauled. I also expect other systems to get tweaks, especially when playing with PySEx.

wait, i thought PySEx is gonna be a completely separate experience, not a continuation/overhaul of pY as it is now

[protocol-1903]

wait, i thought PySEx is gonna be a completely separate experience, not a continuation/overhaul of pY as it is now

Yes, PySEx is a separate experience. However, there will be changes to pYmods in general in anticipation. Like how 2.0 pY is different from 1.1 pY in some ways but the exact same in other ways.

[Septiple]

Thanks for taking the time to post your thoughts. I'm not going to respond to every single thing you raised, but a fair few I (and the devs more broadly) agree with, and we already plan to address them with the PySE change, either by reworking certain parts of the current mods (it'll be a 3.0 release just like PyAE had the 2.0 release), or by letting the PySE mechanics improve things such as power diversity.